Obedience to the Church

Because of the great confusion which still persists in some areas of the beliefs and practices of some Catholics, I offer the following excerpts for reflection - particularly to those who persist in their open defiance of Archbishop Burke and in their rebellion against lawful ecclesiastical authority. It is my hope that this will be a source of greater understanding regarding the importance and necessity of obedience, despite the difficulties one may have encountered in trying to live one's life as a faithful member of Christ's Mystical Body.

All emphasis below is mine. Enjoy!
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by John A. Hardon, S.J.

An obvious difference exists between the Catholic and other Christian concepts of ecclesiastical authority. Where the Catholic believes his Church to be invested with divine authority and demanding complete obedience, Protestants and others do not feel themselves so bound. Their implicit idea is that no visible agency, not even the Church, has access to the fullness of truth or its correlative certitude. It cannot, therefore, command absolute submission to its precepts if it does not claim to possess infallible certainty.
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A Catholic, on the other, by the very fact of his religious profession believes that the Church is God's vice-gerent, His visible spokesman to the world and authorized by Him to direct its members on the road to heaven. In the degree to which his faith is strong, he is ready to put aside his own private judgment and prompt to obey in all things what he considers not an authoritarian institution but an extension of Christ Himself. Three levels of obedience are conceivable:

The first and lowest, is the obedience of execution which carries a command into external effect, but without internal submission of mind and will. This scarcely merits the name of obedience.

The second degree, or obedience of the will, is praiseworthy and highly meritorious because it involves the sacrifice of human freedom for the love of God.

At the highest level stands obedience of the intellect which is possible because, except in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the will for its own motives can bend the understanding; it is reasonable because, for the Catholic, nothing could be more intelligent than submission of mind to infinite wisdom; it is also necessary to insure proper subordination in a hierarchical society and protect the subject from internal conflict.

The Christian faith is essentially obscure, i.e., accepted on divine authority and not because intrinsically evident. Its very nature, therefore, places a burden on the intellect that needs to be recognized and properly handled. . .For a Catholic, the fundamental reason is the Church's divine mission, given by Christ, to establish laws and prescribe their observance. . .[This] applies to all the commandments of the Church, and not only the universal precepts but every command, even personal, made by valid ecclesiastical authority.

...The difficulty with obeying ecclesiastical authority may be a persuasion that the command is too hard for me...[This] requires cultivation of the right mental attitude.

Feelings of inadequacy, poor health, the memory of past failures, the dread of being estranged or humiliated, and the fear of all sorts of possibilities, real or imaginary, will conspire to make a precept of obedience seem like a piece of tyranny unless the mind uses a heavy counterpoise to maintain a balanced judgment. The counterpoise, which comes from the depths of one's faith, is a settled conviction that "God does not command the impossible. But when He commands, He warns you to do what you can, and also to pray for what you cannot do, and He helps you so that you can do it. For His commandments are not burdensome; His yoke is sweet and His burden light." This conviction is indispensable. Unless nourished and developed, even the gravest obligations will be disobeyed and their gravity obscured by the pressure of the emotions on the mind.

It may happen that a command seems unreasonable on the score of inefficiency, ineptitude, or any one of a dozen natural causes. Assuming that due representation has been made and there is no suspicion of sin if the order is carried out, the perfectly obedient man will look for reasons to support the precept and instinctively avoid any mental criticism.

The ground for this attitude is once more the faith. From a natural standpoint the order may be a poor decision and scarcely suited to achieve the purpose intended, but supernaturally a Catholic knows that his obedience can never be fruitless. When the apostles cast their nets into the water at the bidding of Christ, they were obedient, as Peter said, only the word of the Master; and the miraculous draught which followed symbolizes this higher than ordinary providence, which disposes all things surely to their appointed end as foreseen and directed by God and beyond the calculations of men. There is no question here of conceiving a deus ex machina or relying on miracles, while admitting their possibility. It is rather a firm belief that a person's submission to the divine will has a guarantee of success that he can always hope for from the One whom he ultimately obeys, because it involves the prevision of myriad hidden forces, which He infallibly foresees, and their infinite combinations, which He infallibly designs.

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You may read the entire Chapter on Authority and Obedience here.